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The Art of Cruelty A Reckoning Maggie Nelson W.W. Norton: 304 pp., $24.95 From a movie billboard in her Los Angeles neighborhood to the Italian Futurists, Maggie Nelson swings her lively gaze across a century's worth of art and culture in "The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning." The starting point for this study of violence and art is Antonin Artaud, the French playwright behind the "theatre of cruelty" who wrote that cruelty in art "signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination." Those ideas fascinate Nelson, but they don't hold sway over her; she often brings up Buddhist thinking as a counterpoint, and...

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The Art of Cruelty
A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson
W.W. Norton: 304 pp., $24.95
From a movie billboard in her Los Angeles neighborhood to the Italian Futurists, Maggie Nelson swings her lively gaze across a century's worth of art and culture in "The...

Strike a pose
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I wonder, as they sit in their separate cells, what songs the three jailed members of Pussy Riot sing to themselves to keep their spirits strong. My vote: “Resist Psychic Death” by the early 1990s punk feminist band Bikini Kill. The verse offers a...

A contemporary house in the Hollywood Hills West "bird streets" area where Beatle John Lennon once landed has sold, again, for $4.2 million. It had previously changed hands in April, also for $4.2 million.
The seller, from the United...

Before Linda McCartney ever laid eyes on her husband-to-be at the launch party for the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" in 1967, she was already a reputable rock 'n' roll photographer capturing candid behind-the-scenes images of late '60s ...

Selda, Sly and the Family Stone, William Onyeabor, Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band and Pat Jordache make the cut. The Portland, Ore.-based singer and songwriter Merrill Garbus records music as Tuneyards, whose new album, “Who Kill,” will no doubt land ...

The weekly Pop & Hiss rundown of the weekend's top concerts. Sleep @ the Wiltern. This is a relatively rare appearance by the Bay Area's metal forebears and somewhat of a surprisingly large venue for the underground act. The Wiltern, ...

Developer Jorge Perez has agreed to donate $35 million in cash and art from his collection to the Miami Art Museum in a deal that would rename the museum after him. Gary Tinterow, an executive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has been chosen to b

Times music write Todd Martens files his first report from Austin, Texas. Among the early highlights are Bear in Heaven and Light Asylum. Also, a German act raps about choosing an iPhone over a boyfriend.